The “mystique” of Friedan’s famous title could do with some demystifying. It refers to the notion, both gauzy and entrenched, that woman is a special sort of being, precious and to be protected from the world, which is the preserve of men. The prime argument of the book, which encompasses social science, history, and psychology, is that when kept in the prison of this mystique—in the thwarted, infantilized state of mere helpmeet, living only through her husband and children—a woman cannot be fulfilled. “Fulfillment” is hard to quantify. So often in the book it seems like a euphemism for power. Were all the wage-laboring husbands slogging off to clock in and out at offices or factories fulfilled? The postwar United States was not exactly built in utopian service to half its population and the realization of their creative, spiritual, and intellectual potential either. Later, Friedan would acknowledge that, though men had more power, they were perhaps “as damaged by the iron mask of machismo as women were by the feminine mystique.” To broaden her aperture to analyze the economic conditions of gender relations would have made for a more nuanced book, but would perhaps have diluted the potency of her polemic.
The book’s purview doesn’t extend much beyond the lives of white, middle-class American women—her Smith classmates and people like them. Later, as founder and head of the National Organization for Women, or NOW, Friedan sought, energetically if imperfectly, to include Black and working-class women in the struggle for equality. In 1990, acknowledging the book’s demographic narrowness, Friedan explained that she did not include Black women because her editor advised her “she was already taking too much on.”
One question Shteir’s book provokes is by what metrics we might judge feminist gains. In 1998, reflecting on the paradigm of her 1963 bestseller, Friedan described the situation of women as “defined by her relationship to a man and children—wife, mother, housekeeper, sex object, server of needs, never a person defining herself by her own actions in society.” All of which now sounds mercifully quaint—if not yet extinct.
